Distributed Smart Space Orchestration

My research falls into the area of Ubiquitous Computing. More particular, I am doing research in between the Pervasive Computing Domain and the System Management Domain.

Our environments are full of technical equipment. Today it is possible to buy networked sensors and actuators to measure and interact with the physical environment in regular stores.

So-called Smart Devices are embedded systems that allows to sense and actuate their environment from a remote location via software. Today, such Smart Devices can be bought for different purposes in regular stores. Examples are remote controllable power plugs, lights, or thermostats.

Physical spaces that contain Smart Devices are called Smart Spaces. Managing the devices with software services is called Software Orchestration.

A major challenge preventing our environments from being smart is the missing interoperability of the Smart Devices. Typically such devices use heterogeneous interfaces. There is no common platform to interconnect them. What is missing today is not suitable hardware but suitable software!

I use the term Software Orchestration to describe the management of Smart Devices with software. Such software-based management is known from smartphones in a smaller scale. There, software (App) controls the Smart Devices, which are the camera, the screen, the microphone, the flash light, etc. Thousands of Apps can be downloaded from App stores to smartphones today.

My goal is to create an ecosystem similar to the App economy for Smart Spaces. I want to enable that you can download Apps into your Smart Spaces in the future. This will have fundamental impact on the way we live as it can turn spaces that are mostly static today into something dynamic.

ResearchAreas

Fig. 1: My research map. My main focus is on the green and yellow components.

My research focuses on different areas as shown in Fig. 1. They include